The Time Sink

Man, I am glad growing season is over... Yeah, around here 'growing season' starts when the crops are in, usually sometime around my birthday. That's when we end up at Grandma's for pizza, cake and ice cream. ...and that's when it begins once again, that period of too much food and not enough exercise!

Fortunately, January is here, and with it the departure of the last of the Christmas goodies and the return of some semblance of sanity. No more stress eating. No more extended meals in faraway places. No more boxes of sugar and lard dropped off by well-meaning folks (that one box of See's candies excepted <g>); no more late night nibbling...

Hey, remember the old Daynotes Map? (Not for the dialup crowd; it's a slow load due to some old tech in its makeup.) ...and at one point, we had some backchannel chat going on about 'missile coordinates' to go along with it. ...and I recall Bo and I having master files someplace in case the technology improved. Hey, guess what? Yeah, new tech, The ICBM Address Server:

Heh. Wanna' meet my neighbors? Try this:

Late again today... Just like the entire day! ...and cold and foggy it's been here. Those Santa Anas blowing down south have hardly touched the weather pattern in the central valley...

...but they're talking rain Thursday or Friday, so maybe this feeling of living in a murky fishtank (as opposed to the "inverted blue bowl" theory espoused by Bilbrey) may pass. We've caught a break this year with the inversion layer not happening and trapping the fog in. On the other hand, we haven't had sufficient cold to set the stonefruit and nut crops either (we've had maybe two days of frost and probably only half the 45F mornings those crops need). Maybe a weather maker will push through and make it cold for at least a few days more. I mean, I have bulbs pushing up...

Hmmmm.... Ever have this situation? You have a digital camera and you come back from a photo session and find your session isn't there? Yeah, bummer. ...or maybe not.

The other day I came back home from a walkabout to find that day's folder just flat missing from the SD chip in my camera. WT??? Everything had looked good during the shoot! I mean, the camera was clicking and the short movie was saving and the counter was decrementing with each still shot... Even more puzzling was the look in Explorer under Win2k: the 'used' matched up rather well with what I had shot previously and what I had thought I'd shot that day...

So I called the vendor for the chip. I wanted to know whether they had a clue. Yeah, they had one: "Sometimes you need to reformat the disks." -Doh, gee I'd have never thought of that! Sheesh. He did mention that there were file recovery programs available and gave me two web sites to check. ...and about that time the flag went up in my head about things like FATs and such. I mean, these are essentially HDDs by one view point.

Well, I did find a hack that would probably work, using "dd" to copy the chip to the HDD of the Linux box and then running a program against it. ...but I really didn't want to deal with that this week. ...especially as the shots could be duplicated with just another foggy day out and about. So I tried one of the sites mentioned by the tier one dude: Photorecovery; I downloaded their demo (view but no save) and took a look at the chip.

Sweet!!! The program ran though the entire chip and popped up thumbnails of everything I can remember taking. Very nice. ...and it's a standalone: I even ran it from its downloaded zipped state from the ZIP disk it was on <g>! Yeah, that's rude, but stress tests are a way of life around here. A little research shows the earlier versions of the program were very well received in the digital photographer's community when they were freeware. Sadly, it no longer is. ...and I don't have $40US worth of information to recover. That won't stop me from posting about it though; what if I had say, Very Important Pics on that chip? Yeah, in a heartbeat...

Well, we got our rain! Overnight, things turned into a real nice slow, soaking rain, certainly much more than the chance of showers the forecasters called for. That's cool, we need all we can get. I haven't heard if it hit the mountains enough to help the snow pack, but it did the job here on the valley floor.

...and I finished a project late this evening for submission elsewhere, so that's another load off. Tomorrow I'm hoping to get at least one machine moved from Brad's room, since that Just Didn't Happen last weekend. Hey, maybe two!

Server move tomorrow. ...barring acts of anyone and everything. I almost went for it today. ...until I realized I'd left Shelley out of the loop, literally! Yeah, if I move the server and the router and the access point to the garage, I'm golden. ...but I'm on the wireless leg of things in the kitchen and Shelley is still on the wired side in the bedroom. Oh, bother... I need to backpull her wire from the closet and extend it to the hub that's going in the garage so she can stay connected. I mean, or face a fate worse than death or some such...

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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